Beauty

At night beside you I dream of ordinary things:

late summers in June, the forgotten fields,

the fading old light of the stars.

You feel too deeply, you tell me after

you have undressed me in the dim light

of lamp and window, kissing my collarbone,

my neck, my navel.

How is it that people come to hold

power over other people?

Beauty, maybe. Like the women

in your stories who you loved and lost

and loved again. Who left you as you

sometimes left them–tearing through the heart

in all those years before I learned exactly

how to kiss a man and where.

You tell me that you hesitate

to use the word love, and I think of my

and my boots by the door. I think that I am not like

the stars that refuse to be forgotten, or even the pale,

quiet moon that returns again each night. No,

I am the field where they keep the extra

bales of hay, constant, endless as

dirt itself. These are the great metaphors

I invent beside you at night while you sleep

and I wonder from where my sadness comes

and goes, and why it is too much to want you

inside this small and fragile world.